The ability of a school, after school program and/or parent to know that a child has safely boarded the correct bus and exited at the correct stop after school has ended is currently very limited or doesn't exist. Children normally have three options when leaving school depending on each child's intended destination: One option is to board a school bus that is intended to take the child home; a second option is to board a school bus that is intended to transport the child to an after school care provider; and a third option is to have alternate transportation, such as being picked up by a guardian or biking or walking home. These options may change from day to day for each student. Of course, the correct destination for a student on any given day must be communicated by the student's guardian to the school who then must ensure the student is transported to the correct destination.
Currently a system does not exist to ensure students are boarding the correct busses and to keep track of attendance of students on buses. Currently, schools do not have a centralized system for organizing the dismissal of students onto busses and tracking students throughout that process. Therefore, schools have no record or verification system to tell them what bus a student boarded and where the student is after he or she has stepped onto a bus. This causes a great deal of confusion, especially when a student intentionally or unintentionally boards the incorrect bus.
For example, a student may incorrectly board a bus that takes the student home sometimes to an empty and locked house. As a result, the student ends up alone and unsupervised at home for an extended period of time.
Another example is if a student boards an incorrect bus altogether and gets off the bus at a stop that is nowhere near his or her home.
In any of these cases, there is no record of how the student left school and hours can pass by the time anyone realizes the child is missing and not where they are supposed to be.
This problem exists not only for the schools but also for after school care providers that are responsible for the safety of the students being transported from the school to the after school care provider. The lack of an automated tracking system on the bus and communication between the school and the after school program can lead to children becoming lost. Even the use of conventional attendance tracking methods does not prevent the loss of children and delays the discovery that a child is not in the correct place for an unacceptable period of time, which can be hours. For example, when students arrive at an after school care provider, they are checked in manually with pencil and paper and then that attendance may be entered into a software component. This method is inefficient and time consuming and can lead to errors in the check in process.
In addition, the attendance records are only accessible from the school or location where the attendance was entered. Therefore, there is no real time communication between the guardian, school and after school care provider so that any of the three interested parties can at any time determine where the child is supposed to be transported to after school, where the child is during the transportation process and to where the child was transported.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for centralizing communication between guardians, school personnel and after school care providers in a tracking system that ensures students are boarding the correct buses based on predetermined destinations and safely arriving at those predetermined destinations.